If you look beyond the over-hyped, revenue-less startups in New York, you'll find other entrepreneurs who are quiet and heads-down, creating real businesses.
One of those entrepreneurs is Vivek Sharma. After a year of tremendous growth, investors have rewarded his company, Movable Ink, handsomely with an $11 million Series B round led by Intel Capital.
Movable Ink offers subtle, real-time updates to emails once they've been sent. Other investors include Contour Venture Partners, Metamorphic Ventures, ff Venture Capital, Silicon Valley Bank, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, and Silicon Valley wunderkind, Sahil Lavingia. The company has raised $12.3 million to date.
At the end of 2011, Moveable Ink was a team of five that generated just $2,000 annually. It was pitching its magic email product to the wrong people – small startups that take a long time to onboard and are only willing to pay peanuts.
In 2012, Sharma and his co-founder Michael Nutt decided to change their strategy. The pair started attending email conferences where digitally savvy CMOs frequented. They came armed with a sample Moveable Ink email on their phones. They'd describe their product to the CMOs there who couldn't believe their eyes. Moveable Ink's emails included things like weather forecasts that changed based on the recipient's location, and recent tweets that changed in the person's email as new updates came through.
The first big account Moveable Ink landed was Electronic Arts. Now it has signed on hundreds of brands including Starbucks, American Eagle Outfitters, Barclays, Verizon and RadioShack. Sharma's company now has 24 people and its annual revenue run rate is in the millions. Sharma expects his team will be 60 people by year-end.
Below is a sample of Moveable Ink's magical emails. Food delivery company Seamless sent this to customers with local weather for the following three days based on where the user was when the email was opened. It also had a call-out when there as inclement weather that Moveable Ink generated in real-time. The message read, "Don't get drenched. Order in!"
